[Mailman-Developers] [GSOC 2013] Introduction and Ideas

[Karthikeya Viswanath]

 Hi,
 I'm Karthikeya , a 2nd year undergrad from IIT Madras in Chennai, India.

I'd like to take up a Mailman project as a part of GSOC 2013.
I set up Mailman 3 and started tinkering with a couple of bugs . Hope to
come up with something useful soon.

I went through the ideas list,  and some ideas seemed interesting.
In no particular order,

1. RSS , NNTP access to the archives
              The ideas page mentions a previous GSOC project on this. I've
not been able to find it , so could someone please direct me to it?

2. Full anonymization
               This seems straightforward, so is there something else that
can be added to it? Like enabling the hashing option for other lists in
which anonymization is allowed?

3. No logging
               This seems a very interesting project, and something a mail
archive should have. But I'm not very familiar with the laws that
concern subpoena
with respect to archived communication. Can someone please elaborate on
this?

4. Web Posting Interface
               I've had experience in designing a forum structure before,
and this seems a really great addition to Mailman.

I also have a couple of ideas of my own, and I'd like to see how feasible
they are.
1. Tags:  Could we have tags for mails so we could get an idea for what the
mail is about at a glance? This could also help in the metrics and also in
spam reduction . ( As in undesired mails )
2. Better filters for archive download:  Give users the option to download
specific threads of an archive , or all contributions by a specific user or
all threads with a keyword. Last time I had to do it, I had to iterate over
the entire list and save the pages manually.

I have experience at programming in a wide variety of languages . I've had
to set up mailman 2 for our department lists and manage them. I've worked
primarily as a web designer using HTML, PHP and Django. I've longed to work
on an open source project  and these are my first steps at contributing to
a large one.


Tl;Dr  :-  Just another mail by a GSOC hopeful. Bit long, yes.

Thank you.
Karthikeya Viswanath